The aim of this session is to invite science teachers practising ESD to honestly examine their inner relationship to change-making, and discover what the IDG framework offers in response. Also to equip participants with practical, IDG-grounded techniques to help pupils experience sustainability as a way of living, not merely a body of knowledge.
"ESD is more than knowledge and skills — it is a way of living." If this is true: Are we living it? And what might quietly prevent us?
This workshop holds space for both. You'll be invited to notice — honestly and without judgement — how your own sustainability work feels from the inside: the urgency, the satisfaction, the fatigue, and perhaps the subtle resistance when genuine progress appears. You'll encounter the identity trap: the deeply human tendency to become so invested in change-making as a source of meaning that we unknowingly slow our own progress.
Far from a counsel of despair, this is an opening. The IDG framework offers a practical map of the inner capacities that ESD actually demands — and techniques for cultivating them, in yourself and in your pupils.
You'll leave knowing which IDG dimensions your teaching currently develops and which remain untouched — and with a few concrete techniques to help yourself and your pupils experience sustainability as lived reality rather than distant abstraction.
Participants should be able to: > Recognise the identity trap in their own ESD practice and approach it with curiosity rather than resistance > Identify which IDG dimensions their current teaching cultivates and which remain underdevelope > Apply at least one embodied, IDG-grounded technique to help pupils experience sustainability as a way of living
Background: A 2010 School Science Review article observed that ESD requires "tenacity and a specific way of working — it is a way of living." Yet years working across sustainability groups revealed a paradox for me: the more committed the change-maker, the more likely they were to have lost felt, embodied connection to what a sustainable future actually looks like to inhabit. Busy change-making had quietly replaced the lived experience of the change itself. A second, more confronting pattern emerged: we often unknowingly derive identity, purpose, and meaning from the change-making process. When genuine solutions surface, they are subtly resisted — completing the work would require reinventing ourselves. Kegan and Lahey (2009) name this the immunity to change: competing commitments operating largely beneath awareness.
The Inner Development Goals framework (IDG Foundation, 2021), co-created with over 1,000 researchers and practitioners, maps 23 inner skills across five dimensions — Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting — as the missing complement to the SDGs, and offers a rigorous developmental path for the inner work ESD actually demands.
